Bienvenido N. Santos

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Greater Shouting and Greater Silences: The Novels of Bienvenido Santos

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Thematically, the novels of Bienvenido Santos share a natural affinity with his three volumes of short stories. His concern, consistently, has been with man's imperfect attempts to satisfy an innermost need to belong to others—to be able to say of a family, a community, a culture, a kind, that these are his. However, although the anguish of incomplete attachment is common to characters in both Santos' novels, the narrative surfaces of these two works make a striking contrast. Villa Magdalena is densely textured, highly organized, and unpredictable. In style, The Volcano, is open, direct, unsophisticated; in structure, straight-forward except for conventional flashbacks and shifts in angle of vision. (p. 76)

Two unlikely windows for looking into Villa Magdalena are the echolalia of Balatang, an otherwise ordinary house servant, and the rise of garbage collector Modesto Buan to the pinnacle of a cathedral-building religious cult, The Faithful. So large is the novel that these minor characters hardly distract the reader's attention from the Conde-Medallada household. Yet the echolalia epitomizes the recurring imagery of mirrors become a nightmare maze; and Buan is a parody of natural ambition gone berserk in its self-idolatry and manipulation of others….

Betrayal and infidelity are common motifs in the development of Villa Magdalena not merely to record a social phenomenon—the double standard of a morality which is permissive under its surface of strictness—but also to symbolize the irony of persons in need of love and confidence abusing others with an identical need. Thus the virtue of integration, abused, becomes a vice. (p. 78)

[The characters] are entangled in a world of manipulation and proxies. But they are not duplicates of one another. Bienvenido Santos has chosen Fred as his exclusive narrator because Fred's passion for identity, his rage for status, abuses others so persistently that it best exemplifies the violence, the mutual violation, which passes for love or admiration among them….

Precisely because Fred is central to a novel about flawed human awareness, he cannot be permitted by the author the degree of perceptiveness which, nevertheless, the reader is required to develop…. Yet Fred is so ready to conceive of his moral illness as health that, if anything, his symbolic rebirth at the end of Villa Magdalena, as he flings open the windows of the household, is suspect. It simply is not true that, after all passion is spent, wisdom irresistibly follows. Consequently, Santos has invented a series of symbolic conditions to help represent the scope of both Fred's sickness and his society's; and has utilized Don Magno, principally, to illustrate what strengths the weak can summon, and so to legitimatize the appeal to mercy which ultimately, in the novel, supersedes analysis and indictment. (p. 79)

If Fred as narrator is necessarily the fictional center of Villa Magdalena, Don Magno as the most fully emergent tragic figure is its moral center….

It is not necessary, however, that fiction provide a clearminded spokesman, a single member of the action, to paraphrase its fable at the end. The reader is privy to the entire narrative, which often is beyond the comprehension of the narrator himself or any other single character. So it seems to be with Villa Magdalena whose symbol clusters and character schemata are more illuminating than Fred's philosophizing. (p. 80)

Precisely because Villa Magdalena is ambitious and because its general design can be reasonably demonstrated, [its few] imperfections become more visible. Nevertheless, the novel represents a major achievement in the development of both its author's craft and the national literature.

All the density which one associates with Villa Magdalena is noticeably absent from The Volcano. But since even in the former novel silence assists shouting as a means of communication, the underwritten quality of The Volcano cannot be presumed to be accidental or nonfunctional but has to be considered with critical care.

The contours of The Volcano, when graphed, approximate the perfect slopes of Mayon itself, if one takes as the plot line two parallel motifs—the gradual assimilation of the American missionaries, the Hunter Family: and their ultimate rejection by Filipinos after the war; the even greater irony of Dr. Hunter's growing dedication to his adopted countrymen: and his admitted repudiation of them when he separates his daughter from Badong, her Filipino husband. The "peak" of Philippine-American unity occurs at the very midpoint of the novel during a Christmas service and meal, when the refugees are joined in perfect communion…. All national differences have disappeared. But the start of an abrupt decline is dramatized in the very next episode. In the … Cave of the Bats, Badong and Flor discover each other sexually. Their physical union might have been used to reinforce the earlier mystical union. Instead it is pictured as a travesty, a fall into the inferno; and their revulsion is a prefiguration of the final horror of their separation, their declared love parodied by the grotesquely artificial dialogue as they "come together" in their last moments alone.

At the risk of creating only a tour de force, by making the silhouette of plot (rising and falling action) coincide too neatly with that of its privileged symbol, Santos has at least taken the volcano off the horizon, where it tends to be picturesque and obvious, and has placed it inside his characters. (pp. 81-2)

In some ways, the symbol most complementary to the volcano is cadang-cadang, which "emptied the interior of coconut trunks with no visible sign of blight on the outside while the rotting went on inside the tree…." It comes to represent the hollowness of postwar Philippine society, in which former collaborators prosper and once gentle people are reduced to violence in order to survive the rigors of competitive peace. But it especially represents the essential mediocrity, the shallowness of spirit, in Dr. and Mrs. Hunter…. In some ways, Santos' is a devastating portrait of the American do-gooder, "well-intentioned, but…."… From the very start, the Hunters represent advanced stages of cadang-cadang. (pp. 82-3)

[One difficulty with] the novel is its naive style, which hardly rises—in syntactical pattern or excitement…. The Volcano covers thirty years (1928–1958) in Dr. Hunter's effort as a missionary doctor in Bicol; and momentous events, both personal and public, occurred in that period. But the reader has only a stage-by-stage recapitulation of many of these events, except for major catastrophes, with the passage of time marked by the more or less regular eruptions of Mayon. This dehydration of history, like the elementary level of the rhetoric itself, matches the life-style of the Hunters. They are stereotyped Midwest farmers, Methodist ministers who busy themselves with sanitation problems, injections, and constant inspirational quotations from Scriptures. Myopic Sarah Hunter is particularly one-dimensional, with her comments—intended to show broad rapport and folksy Christian interest—on the cute, the sweet, and the poor, the lovely Filipino people.

A narrative method which deliberately misses most of the Philippine situation would be a perfect means of characterizing the Hunters; of explaining how, insensitive to early symptoms, they could be so stunned at changes that seem to erupt abruptly. (p. 83)

The Volcano's flaw is not that its form is simplistic; but that those over-simplifications are not justified functions of theme or character.

It would be unjust to speak of The Volcano as only "notes toward an unfinished novel," undefined and indeterminate. The same mind and emotional momentum, if not quite the same quality of imaginative search, are evident in both Villa Magdalena and The Volcano. However, Villa Magdalena has a self-sufficiency which The Volcano lacks. (p. 84)

Leonard Casper, "Greater Shouting and Greater Silences: The Novels of Bienvenido Santos," in Solidarity (copyright 1968 Solidaridad Publishing House), Vol. III, No. 10, October, 1968, pp. 76-84.

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